Site Search Navigation

Search NYTimes.com

Loading...

See next articles

See previous articles

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Supported by

What A Drag

October 17, 2013 7:59 amOctober 17, 2013 7:59 am

As many people have been pointing out, the economic costs of GOP attempts to rule by extortion didn’t begin with the shutdown/debt crisis, and haven’t ended with the (temporary?) resolution of that crisis. The now widely-cited Macroeconomic Advisers report estimated the cost of crisis-driven fiscal policy at 1 percentage point off the growth rate for three years, or roughly 3 percent now. More than half of this estimated cost comes from the “fiscal drag” of falling discretionary spending, with the rest coming from a (shaky) estimate of the impacts of fiscal uncertainty on borrowing costs.

I’ve been looking a bit harder at that report, and while I am in broad agreement with its conclusion, I think it’s missing quite a lot. On balance, I’d argue that the negative effect of the crazies has been even worse than MA says.

OK, first thing: I’m not too happy with the report’s reliance on the Bloom et al uncertainty index to measure costs. As Mike Konczal pointed out a while back, that index is a strange creature, driven to an important extent by the number of times politicians talk about uncertainty. It’s really not something you want to lean on, and if you take it out, MA’s estimates of the Republican drag fall.

But we shouldn’t stop there, because there are two important aspects of the story that MA leaves out.

First, part of the fiscal cliff deal involved letting the Obama payroll tax cut — a significant, useful form of economic stimulus — expire. (Republicans only like tax cuts that go to people with high incomes.) This led to a surprisingly large tax hike in 2013, focused on workers:

Photo

Credit

Second, GOP opposition to unemployment insurance has been the biggest factor in a very rapid decline in unemployment benefits despite continuing weak job markets:

Photo

Credit

This hurts the unemployed a lot, but it also hurts the economy, because the unemployed are already living on the edge, and surely must have been forced into spending cuts as benefits expired.

The combination of the payroll take hike and the benefit cuts amounts to about $200 billion of fiscal contraction at an annual rate, or 1.25 percent of GDP, probably with a significant multiplier effect. Add this to the effects of sharp cuts in discretionary spending and the effects of economic uncertainty, however measured, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that extortion tactics may have shaved as much as 4 percent off GDP and added 2 points to the unemployment rate.

In other words, we’d be looking at a vastly healthier economy if it weren’t for the GOP takeover of the House in 2010.